КОНСПЕКТ «НАУКИ ЛОГИКИ». УЧЕНИЕ О ПОНЯТИИ
Date: 1915
Source: PSS vol 29
Translated by: AI (Claude)

||
||
|||
|||
|||
hierarchy and we must preserve both definitions as separate, then contradiction should be considered as something more profound and essential. For in opposition to it, identity is the definition only of simple immediate, dead being; contradiction, however, is the root of all movement and vitality; only insofar as something has in itself contradiction does it move, possess impulse and activity.

||
||
||
||
||
|||
|||
|||
|||
Contradiction is usually eliminated, firstly, from things, from the existent and the true in general; it is asserted that there is nothing contradictory. Secondly, it, on the contrary, is displaced into subjective reflection, which supposedly first creates it through its relation and comparison. But even in this reflection it is not properly there, since the contradictory can neither be represented nor thought. In general it is considered both in actuality and in thinking reflection as something accidental, as it were an anomaly and a passing sickly paroxysm.

As regards the assertion that there is no contradiction, that it is not something existing, we need not worry about such assurance; the absolute definition of essence must be inherent in every experience, everything actual, as well as every concept. Above, regarding the infinite, which is contradiction as the latter manifests itself in the sphere of being, something similar has already been pointed out. Ordinary experience itself testifies that there exists at least a multitude of contradictory things, contradictory institutions, etc., the contradiction of which is contained not only in external reflection but in themselves. But, further, contradiction should not be considered simply some sort of anomaly occurring only here and there: it is the negative in its essential definition, the principle of all self-movement, consisting in nothing other than a certain portrayal of contradiction. External sensuous movement itself is its immediate existence. Something moves not simply in the sense that it in this "now" -

||
||
||
126
V. I. LENIN

is here, and in another "now" - there, but insofar as it in one and the same "now" is here and not here, insofar as it in this "here" simultaneously is and is not. One must together with the ancient dialecticians acknowledge the contradictions indicated by them in movement, but it does not follow from this that therefore there is no movement, but on the contrary, that movement is itself existing contradiction.

||
||
||
||
||
Likewise the internal, proper self-movement, impulse in general (appetite or nisus* of the monad, entelechy of absolutely simple essence) consists in nothing other than that in one and the same relation there exist something in itself and its absence, the negative of itself. Abstract identity with itself is not yet vitality, but since the positive in itself is negativity, it thereby goes outside itself and brings about its change.

Thus, something is vital only insofar as it contains in itself contradiction and is precisely that force which is capable of containing and enduring this contradiction in itself. If something existing is not capable in its positive definition of at the same time passing into its negative and holding one in the other, if it is incapable of having contradiction in itself, then this something is not a living unity, is not ground, but in contradiction goes to ruin. Speculative thinking consists only in that it holds fast to contradiction and in it to itself, and not in that, as is characteristic of representation, it is in the power of contradiction and allows it only to dissolve its definitions into others or into nothing" (67-70) [519-521].

Movement and "self-movement" (this NB! spontaneous (independent), spontaneous, internally-necessary movement), "change", "movement and vitality", "principle of all self-movement", "impulse" (Trieb) to "movement" and to "activity" -

* - nisus. Ed.
127